Character-Driven Films (but Keep the Kaboom)

By DAVE ITZKOFF

Published: June 24, 2007

WHEN they befriended each other in a high school class on French New Wave cinema, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci vowed that some day they would write intimate, character-driven films in the style of Jean-Luc Godard. ''We were totally gung-ho to make really revolutionary independent movies,'' Mr. Kurtzman said in a recent conversation. ''We wanted to throw $50,000 into some movie and just make it.''

Sure enough, Mr. Kurtzman and Mr. Orci, both 33, ended up as screenwriters -- for movies that cost roughly 1,000 to 3,000 times as much. And while their scripts may deal with the knotty details of relationships, they are usually concerned with, say, the bonds between on-the-lam lovers who discover that they're clones, or a squad of hulking robots able to transform themselves into all manner of motor vehicles.

In Hollywood Mr. Kurtzman and Mr. Orci have become the go-to screenwriters for mega-budget fare like ''Mission: Impossible III'' and ''The Island,'' as well as this week's film adaptation of ''Transformers,'' based on the Hasbro toy franchise. And they have recently completed a ''Star Trek'' prequel intended to rejuvenate that venerable science-fiction franchise.

Yet while these screenwriters concede with laughter that their careers may have strayed somewhat from their youthful auteurist tendencies, ''that spirit,'' Mr. Orci said, ''lives on.''

Whether they are writing about suave secret agents or androids from the planet Cybertron, the men said they still applied certain principles in their work, lessons that can be traced back to their formative experiences watching ''Week End'' and ''Pierrot le Fou.''

''The emphasis we were given was in viewpoint and living inside the mind of your characters,'' Mr. Kurtzman said, speaking from the production office he shares with Mr. Orci on DreamWorks' portion of the Universal back lot in Studio City, Calif.

''It doesn't matter if people think what you're doing is camp,'' he said. ''You have to take your genre seriously. If you write it tongue-in-cheek, the audience will see it, and they'll feel they're being talked down to.''

''And,'' he added, ''they'll kill you.''

That tension between the desires of a general moviegoing audience and the demands of more passionate, opinionated fans, they said, is one they have been acutely aware of since before they began writing professionally.

As teenagers Mr. Kurtzman, a native of Santa Monica, Calif., and Mr. Orci, who was born in Mexico City, bonded over their shared love of blockbuster movies like ''Back to the Future'' and ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'' as they studied avant-garde cinema at the nonconformist Crossroads School in Santa Monica. (''By the time we were in the 11th grade,'' Mr. Kurtzman said, ''we were doing Marxist analysis of 'Robocop.' '')

During their college years, as Mr. Kurtzman transferred from New York University to Wesleyan and Mr. Orci bounced from Bard College to the University of Texas, the two remained in contact and used their free time to collaborate (in Mr. Kurtzman's words) on ''terrible, awful'' relationship dramas, written at various coffee shops around Southern California.

In 1997 Mr. Kurtzman was hired as an assistant at Renaissance Pictures, the company of Sam Raimi and the producer Rob Tapert, which produced the television adventure series ''Hercules: The Legendary Journeys'' and ''Xena: Warrior Princess.'' Before starting work Mr. Kurtzman was assigned to watch 40 episodes of these shows. ''At about Episode 25,'' he said, ''I called Bob, and I was like, 'Look, I have no idea what the rules of these shows are, but I swear to God, we can write one.' ''

After writing a sample script for ''Hercules,'' Mr. Kurtzman and Mr. Orci were assigned two freelance episodes of the show. The following season, at the age of 24, they were named the show's head writers. Soon the pair became a hot commodity. They joined the writing staff of ''Alias,''J. J. Abrams's spy-thriller television series, in its debut season. And they became favorites of Walter F. Parkes, a DreamWorks production executive, who employed them to write adventure films like ''The Legend of Zorro.''

Yet for Mr. Kurtzman, raised on comic books and science fiction, and Mr. Orci, who once owned a telephone shaped like the Starship Enterprise from ''Star Trek,'' the passage into legitimacy was bittersweet. Where they had been mere consumers of geek entertainment, now they bore the responsibility of creating it.

''You can never be just a fanboy in the eyes of other fanboys,'' Mr. Orci said. ''Because you're also, in a way, the establishment. You're like, 'No, but I'm you.' But you're accountable for all your decisions, and inevitably you can't please everybody.''

Their script for ''Mission: Impossible III'' (which Mr. Kurtzman and Mr. Orci wrote with Mr. Abrams, who directed the film) was criticized for overemphasizing the civilian life of its secret-agent hero. ''The domestication of Ethan Hunt may have seemed like a good idea, a humanizing touch, perhaps, but it only bogs down the action,'' Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times.